Oregon Rep. Lew Frederick was not surprised when he read the Portland Public Schools investigation into tensions at the Metropolitan Learning Center in Northwest Portland.

Frederick, whose father-in-law helped create the school in the 1960s and who taught there himself, said the tensions described in the report reflect an established pattern of new administrators trying to turn the school mainstream. Principal Macarre Traynham -- and the outside investigator who found she did nothing wrong -- seems to be no exception, Frederick said.

“What it shows for me is an incredible lack of understanding of the school, both on the part of the investigator and on the part of the school administration as well, about how the school began,” said Frederick, who also worked as the Portland Public District spokesman for more than a decade. “That’s disturbing because there are some basic concepts behind the school that the administration doesn't want to acknowledge and didn’t want to acknowledge back in 1975.”

The investigation followed reports from parents that Traynham bullied and bulldozed her way to change, pushed teachers into antagonistic racial discussions and excluded students from meetings.

The case unfolded at a school built 46 years ago on a philosophy of open-mindedness.

The Metropolitan Learning Center began in 1968 as a small, unorthodox study group at the Couch School. Parents soon pushed to create their own stand-alone K-12 program, intending to revolutionize education in Portland.

As other schools strained to desegregate under new busing policies, and as North and Northeast Portland business owners struggled to outlast race riots, early leaders at MLC deliberately recruited an ethnically diverse population.

They invited white and black students of all ages to enroll “because a big part of education is learning how the other fellow lives,” reported an October 1968 article in The Oregonian.

The school’s first principal, the late Amasa Gilman, believed each student was as important as the staff. To prove it, he took his office door off the hinges.

Students had as great a say in what and how they learned as the adults who created the school. They attended class only when they wanted to. They studied the subject they felt like studying. No one graded their work.

Gilman ran the school until 1975, when Superintendent Robert Blanchard transferred him to Astor School. Students and teachers protested the move outside the facility with pickets and signs. District leaders, they said, were trying to force changes on a school used to collaboration.

When a new principal took over, Frederick said, he was met with the same kind of resistance Macarre Traynham finds today.

Richard Wheatley expected to find a regular high school when he took Gilman’s place. The new principal asked for meetings with teacher representatives.

“We said, ‘You meet with all of us or you don’t meet with any of us,’” Frederick, a Democrat who represents Northeast Portland in the Oregon House, said. “That was the approach of the school.”

Frederick said the school isn’t quite as radical as it once was. But students continued to “do as they please” long after Gilman left. While Frederick taught there in the 1970s, students helped create classes such as “ethnic cooking” and “the history of Vietnam.”

Classes remained student-driven when author Rebecca Skloot, whose “Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” spent two years on the New York Times Best Seller List, attended in the late 1980s.

Skloot said the school’s laissez-faire attitude led her to discovering the HeLa cells that prompted her book.

“MLC didn’t give grades, students got to design courses for themselves, teachers went by their first names, we sat on the floor instead of lined up in desks, and we read books like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States instead of traditional history books,” she writes on her website. “The whole reason I learned about Henrietta and the HeLa cells in the first place was that I’d flunked my first year of high school and was lucky enough to find an alternative school that gave me the freedom to follow my curiosity wherever it took me.”

Today, parents say they are worried Portland Public Schools officials are chipping away at that autonomy. One of the 34 complaints parents lodged against Traynham concerned her decision to exclude students from a meeting. The principal said she did so because other meetings had grown so heated. She wanted to protect students.

Frederick said that goes against the school’s founding principles.

“The school was designed for parents and students to have an equal voice with the administration,” Frederick said. “It was not designed in the traditional hierarchical fashion.”